Not much new here, mostly the Senate bill warmed over. But there are some new items outlined by the President on Monday, February 22.
For example, the penalty if you don’t buy insurance increases over what is in the Senate bill. This may not be apparent because it is presented in a confusing way. The flat penalty goes down. The percent of income penalty goes up (to 2.5% after 2016). But what you have to know is that it is the greater of the two that you pay. So the penalty fee has gone up. Remember also that the penalty fee is defined as a tax, so you go to jail if you don’t pay it.
Obama’s proposal also includes a new provision giving the Federal Government power to evaluate and reduce medical insurance price increases. This price control power is important. It could lead to the public option which is not directly in President Obama’s proposal. Why? Because the mandate penalties may still not be high enough to force young people into insurance. If not, and if anybody with pre-existing conditions can buy insurance, even at the last minute, then insurance prices will soar. If the federal government blocks the increases, then private companies will leave the business and the public option will replace them.
Leaving these provisions aside, the Obama plan is mostly the old plan. It forces every American to buy into a medical system which is broken. It will thus perpetuate that broken system. The American Medical Association (AMA) and drug companies will have even more control.
Health Savings and related accounts will go. You will have to pay much of your income for health care you don’t want while having to pay more out of pocket to get real health care, preventive and integrative health care, if it is available at all.
What about real competition and real choice in healthcare? It will be gone. What about true preventive measures, such as diet and lifestyle changes to halt diabetes and other chronic preventable diseases before they develop? What about getting back to the basics with wholesome, organic, whole foods? What about decreasing the toxic load in our foods, such as the bisphenol-A that lines all of our canned foods? Why are President Obama, the Senate, and the House seemingly determined to decrease quality of life while further increasing healthcare costs?
The President’s 11-page proposal is to serve as the starting point for the bi-partisan, televised health-care summit to be held Thursday, February 25, 2010. ANH-USA’s expert lobbyists suggest that the summit will bring more of the same one-sided discussions. The President will then try to pass his bill with Democratic votes only, using the so-called Reconciliation Process in the Senate which is supposed to be reserved for budget issues and which only requires 51 votes to pass.
The real question now is what happens in the House. Will enough of the Democrats in districts carried by John McCain stick with the President to pass the bill? Before that happens, we will come back to you with an alert and ask you to flood your representatives and senators with messages, especially those in the “swing” Congressional districts.
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How can you be siding with the medical industrial complex that would like to regulate or eliminate most forms of natural medicine? The status quo does not help me with natural approaches to health care– these are all out-of-pocket anyway. But premiums for my health care are going up and up, and covering less and less things. I want to be covered when if I no longer have a job, and I want to not go bankrupt for medical costs. That way I can afford natural approaches.
I agree with many of your specific campaigns, but will not support you in them because your overall
antagonism to the current attempt at healthcare reform. All the people I know using alternative approaches are very much for the Obama healthcare plan, not the big corporations that now stand between us and our healthcare and decide what they will and will not cover.
Have you ever been denied coverage for capricious reasons?
Again, MORE *Government* control with NO choices for THE PEOPLE. Our freedoms are slowly being taken away….heading into a Socialist/Fascist government. The premise here is NOT to help people get well, but instead keep them sick. Instead of *Educating* patients about their diet, the mainstream doctors will continue to prescribe dangerous pharmaceuticals that will harm the patient, ultimately leading to more illness and then death, thus increasing Big Pharma’s profits.
Again, all I will say on this one is, unless you want to live in a totalitarian/Nazi-like country, you would do well to make sure you defeat any type of universal healthcare. Not only will it cost our country billions of dollars (maybe trillions) to implement and keep running (and probably make us go bankrupt within the next ten years), but anytime anything is put into the hands of government, they have complete and total control and say over everything.
Do you want the government to tell you what you can and cannot do when it comes to your own health? What you can or cannot put in your own body? What you have to take–prescriptions or natural food/medicine? That they can have a say on whether or not you get that liver transplant, or if you can have the “medicine” needed to cure your cancer? They could just let you die from the cancer or not receiving a transplant. For them, it would be cheaper than not treating you. And preventive medicine? I would be real leery about believing the government and that it wants you to be healthy. If that were the case, then why do we have GMOs? Why is Monsanto allowed to spray chemicals and pesticides over all of our food supply (barring organic)? Why do the chemical companies zealously guard their trademark secrets? It’s not to protect us, but them.
Anything to do with our government these days has to do with making sure the CORPORATIONS are safe and fat with money. There are virtually no laws in place to protect us, the consumer. Why, even the pharmaceutical companies have complete immunity against being sued if you are injured when receiving a vaccine. And don’t even get me started on vaccines…
I look at our present healthcare system and how our government is trying to structure things and I shudder. I’m sure anyone who lived through the Holocaust and what Nazi Germany did to the concentration camp victims would shudder as well. We need to heed our past and our history books and not repeat the same mistakes. Oh, wait–our history books are being rewritten to only reflect the good and not the bad. You’d be better off finding some really old history tomes in the used bookstores and reading them–preferrably with a publication date of before1970, possibly even earlier. That’s when all of the government intrusion stepped up big time.
Join with me, fellow citizen warriors, to help take back our country and our government! I can’t think of a better way of doing just that than making sure this universal healthcare bill is never passed. Yes, our healthcare system needs a complete overhaul–but this is definitely NOT it.
Let’s face it folks. In our history when this sort of government meddling, coercion, draconian legal strictures and maneuvering take place it is because some highly placed people representing a dieing industry are trying to save their derieres. Medicine is based on a reductionistic philosophy which works fine for wheel barrows, pitchforks an rocket ships. But, in application to the human body, mind, spirit complex, its utility is limitted. The logic and conclusions circumscribed by the (RP) will produce errors at points when applied to the human BMSC. The errors seem to be at a point that thy havebegun to boil tothe surface in the form of a huge ZIT on the body politic. When it pops, or is squeezed as now it is being, it will hurt like hell – for awhile. It will either explode or involute and cause septicemia. Simply put the (RP) team has run out its string…and will pass.
R.I.P. – just go.
Another that speaks with forked tongue.
You folks really need to have a bill that is consumer friendly, not pro-corporate. We are getting very tired of bait and switch and stonewalling us.
You can’t exclude preexisting conditions if you allow people to defer purchasing insurance until they already have an expensive condition. Forcing those who are currently healthy to pay into the pool for those with preexisting conditions justifies the penalty for not doing so.
If you oppose the penalty, you also oppose coverage of preexisting conditions.
The alternatives that ANH proposes are things that the government may recommend but may not mandate. To present them as a functional alternative to insurance reform is foolish at best and at worst supports the bonuses for the insurance company executives.
Certainly keeping people sick and poor enhances the market for off-the-shelf remedies but (as with faith-healing) is not ethical unless those remedies actually work. I know of too many “natural” products that have been proven worthless but are still on the shelf sucking away money.
If ANH wants to offer a credible alternative, it needs to clean house. Much of so-called “natural health” has not been tested with any rigor. Not just supplements but most of chiropractic and all of homeopathy are without benefit. They must not be covered by any new structure and claims regarding them by ANH only serve to reduce credibility.
Lacking a rational alternative from ANH, I have asked my representatives to support the reconcilliation bill.
This article has false information. You say “You will have to pay much of your income for health care you don’t want while having to pay more out of pocket to get real health care, preventive and integrative health care, if it is available at all.” In President Obama’s proposal preventitive care is required with no copay. You say “Why are President Obama, the Senate, and the House seemingly determined to decrease quality of life while further increasing healthcare costs?” President Obama’s proposal will decrease the national debt by $100 billion over the next decade. If we do nothing healthcare costs WILL RISE ten times the amount. You say several times this is like the old plan. The old plan you refer too must be the NEW plan he announced last summer. I don’t call that old, it hasn’t been passed yet. This plan is not perfect. No plan will be perfect. Neither you, me, or ANYBODY could make a perfect plan. It will never be perfect because the public will never agree all together that it is. Someone will always be unhappy. I think we can all agree that healthcare has many problems that need addressed, so why not let President Obama give it a shot. It can’t be any worse than the status quo, and it can be ammended later. Only time will tell. I support our President.
As usual, the corporate media and Congress fail to frame the issue properly. We have health insurance reform being bantered about in the Congressional Theater, which IS NOT health care reform. Health Care is only required in societies that are absent of wellness because the attached issues of toxic foods, toxic water and toxic air have never been addressed due to the framing of the issue as health care reform. My grand children still are fed pizza, sodas, tater tots, et al at one of the best schools in America, because the USDA, prostitutes to big agriculture, like the FDA is to big pharma, designs the school alleged food program pursuant to the needs of corporations poisoning our food for profit. When we as Americans stop over eating, cast aside sugars, processed grains/rice, HFCS, trans fatty acids, chemically enhanced so called foods and the USDA food pyramid we can begin the process of being well. Then and only then can we discuss health care reform that gives everyone their human and constitutional right to health care to get credible lab tests for the right markers, annual check ups to verify their wellness, dental care, vision care and organic whole food supplements while the big agriculture is phased out. For those who need and have the same right to medical care and emergency medical intervention, there will be plenty of resources to fund that. Once we end the insidious war on drugs we can stop building prisons and spend that on actually helping people with addiction!
I live in Oklahoma,my congressman and my senators are against any healthcare that people can’t choose for themselves.Obama(barry soetora) is working for the NWO as most our presidents have in the last 100 yrs.
No OB’s health care is not better
I am tremendously disappointed and upset that natural/alternative/holistic medicine will not be recognized. as essential for optimun health. Millions of citizens (taxpayers) have the right to choose their medical treatment and the type of care they want to receive! Taking charge of one’s health, preventative and otherwise, is of importance! As the natural/organic industry rises, the government cringes! There is a petition created by Mike Adams aka Health Ranger that should have been in the Senate months ago. I support our right to individual insurance covered healthcare choices. Thousands of signatures were on it. I am so glad that close to the push through of Congress (Dems) Bill for reform, it was stopped! We need to get our rights implemented in the current Republican health bill. The Independent Party has a strong voice……